All-Flash Enterprise Storage: Defining the Foundation for 3rd Platform Application Availability

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1 WHITE PAPER All-Flash Enterprise Storage: Defining the Foundation for 3rd Platform Application Availability Sponsored by: NetApp Eric Burgener November 2014 IDC OPINION Enterprise computing is in the midst of a switch from more static legacy applications to much more dynamic and agile applications driven by mobile, social media, and big data/analytics. The performance, scalability, and agility demands of these applications are driving the rapid buildout of the 3rd Platform of computing. New technologies like virtual infrastructure, flash, and cloud are critical parts of this new platform. To meet these new business requirements, enterprises are forced to deliver applications that not only are central to their business success but also must provide immediate and rapid response to a worldwide customer base on a 24 x 7 basis. Enterprise storage infrastructure, as the foundation for these "always on" application services, is expected to operate almost continuously from installation to retirement. As flash penetrates the enterprise, and flash-based arrays become more mainstream, they will also be forced to meet the six 9s availability requirement. IDC recommends to enterprises that when the time comes to refresh their enterprise storage systems, they absolutely should evaluate all-flash array (AFA) offerings in the market. The best candidates for datacenter deployment will be those systems that not only provide consistently high performance but also can meet the demanding availability requirements of 3rd Platform computing. As the definition of the future enterprise storage workhorse begins to take shape, it is clear that enterprise storage will heavily leverage flash media and be able to provide the kind of continuous availability that this new era of computing requires. IN THIS WHITE PAPER This white paper focuses on the increasing importance of high availability as enterprises continue to build out a 3rd Platform based computing infrastructure. As more mission-critical applications requiring extremely high availability are deployed on virtual infrastructure, enterprises must respond using the right storage solutions. The document identifies critical features in the storage infrastructure necessary to meet these requirements for availability and explores how one vendor, NetApp, meets them with its EF-Series AFA solutions portfolio. November 2014, IDC #251524

2 SITUATION OVERVIEW With the implementation of 3rd Platform computing solutions driven by social media, mobile computing, and real-time business analytics and based on new technologies like virtualization, flash storage, and cloud computing in full swing, one thing is becoming very clear: End users are demanding high-performance IT infrastructure that is always available. As organizations deploy mission-critical platforms like Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, and SharePoint; Oracle; SAP; Web storefronts and sites; virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI); and various industry-specific applications to a worldwide user population, maintenance windows are becoming a thing of the past. From the time IT infrastructure is installed to when it is retired, administrators must be able to perform all capacity expansion, reconfiguration, replacement of failed components, firmware upgrades, performance tuning, and data protection with almost no downtime whatsoever. Over the years, IDC has tracked customer awareness of the cost of downtime and evolving recovery objectives. IDC survey data indicates that the cost of downtime varies from $225,000 per hour for small enterprises (with 1,000 4,999 employees) to $1.65 million per hour for large enterprises (with >10,000 employees). 84% of enterprises have recovery point objectives (RPOs) of less than an hour, and 78% of enterprises have recovery time objectives (RTOs) of less than four hours for their mission-critical application environments. The RPOs and RTOs have been decreasing year over year as IDC has monitored them through survey data, and end users are using their need to meet them to help guide IT purchase decisions. Stringent service-level agreements demand a highly available, highly resilient storage infrastructure. The importance of availability is not limited only to large organizations or specific industries businesses of all sizes have mission-critical applications that can't be down. With IT infrastructure driving real-time business metrics like revenue, production, customer service, and employee productivity for more businesses than ever, this demand for application services that are always on is driving changes in storage technologies and architectures to meet stringent, nearly continuous uptime requirements. Newer storage architectures that are necessary to meet 3rd Platform storage throughput and latency requirements, such as AFAs, must deliver more than just blazing fast performance they must meet a high bar for overall availability as well. Enterprise storage solution vendors like NetApp are leveraging their track record and experience in delivering high-performance, highly available, and highly scalable storage solutions as they incorporate newer technologies like flash into their solutions portfolio. For enterprise-class storage systems that serve as the foundation for mission-critical application services running on 3rd Platform computing infrastructure, six 9s availability is the new design bar. These systems must be specifically architected to deliver this level of availability throughout their entire depreciation life cycles downtime is not an option. The Availability Bar in Enterprise AFAs 51.5% of enterprises have already deployed flash in their datacenters. The remaining 48.5% are evaluating it for deployment over the next 12 months. This strong interest in enterprise flash solutions is being driven primarily by the storage performance requirements of the 3rd Platform of computing. High-density server consolidation onto virtual infrastructure is significantly increasing the storage 2014 IDC #

3 throughput that each physical server (i.e., virtual host) demands, and many of the applications that are running on this infrastructure have I/O profiles where peak I/O requirements may exceed steady-state I/O requirements by as much as 10 times. VDI workloads are a perfect example of this. The "I/O blender effect" of virtual computing compounds this problem, generating extremely random I/O patterns. Pure hard disk drive (HDD) based storage solutions just cannot meet these requirements cost effectively, and the storage overprovisioning that results from trying to do so increases energy and floor space costs as well. This is why IDC recommends that all datacenters use flash in at least some capacity in their virtual infrastructure. Mission-critical applications are one of the key areas where storage performance is most in demand, but enterprises cannot afford to provide it with solutions that do not also meet the need for 24 x 7 operations. Flash-optimized storage architectures deliver the most bang for the buck on performance, but all flash-optimized solutions do not necessarily meet the new availability requirements. The storage solutions best suited to the requirements of the 3rd Platform will combine a flash-optimized storage architecture with hardware and software enhancements specifically designed to enable almost continuous uptime. In Flash-Optimized Storage Architectures (IDC #249295, June 2014), IDC discusses the definition of flash optimization at length. In brief, a flash-optimized storage architecture is an architecture specifically designed with flash in mind, incorporating features designed to maximize the performance, endurance, and usable capacity of flash. These types of platforms will include capabilities such as free space management that does not impact the ability of the system to deliver predictable performance as it scales, write minimization to help maximize flash endurance, and storage-efficiency technologies to make the most efficient use of available flash capacity. Although storage solutions have historically been evaluated using dollar-per-gigabyte metrics, that is not the best way to understand the value of flashbased systems. Metrics like dollar per IOPS, IOPS per watt, IOPS per terabyte, and, in particular, total cost of ownership (TCO) are much better measures because they take the secondary economic benefits of flash the need for far fewer devices to meet performance requirements, reduced energy and floor space costs, the need for fewer servers to drive storage performance, and lower software licensing costs (because fewer servers are needed) into account in a way that dollar per gigabyte does not. Enterprises care about storage performance on their mission-critical applications, and because of the importance of these applications to their daily business operations, any storage solution they consider must be able to meet extremely stringent uptime requirements. Resilient Storage: The Foundation for Application Availability Organizations have always relied on highly resilient and available storage systems when building an enterprise datacenter infrastructure to support mission-critical applications. New technologies like flash are particularly interesting in today's performance-driven, data-intensive application portfolios because of their ability to meet performance requirements more cost effectively. But these application portfolios, which consist of a mix of structured, unstructured, and semistructured data types that span transactional, analytic, and file-sharing use cases, carry with them a need to operate around the clock. The need for high availability applies to businesses of all sizes and types. Whether applications perform stock trades, collect and analyze healthcare records, support education, improve manufacturing processes, drive order fulfillment, track services usage, or monitor inventory, today's "always on" businesses depend on a highly available, highly resilient storage foundation for the IT infrastructure IDC #

4 New technologies like flash must be deployed without impacting the ability to meet guaranteed service levels in shared environments or provide continuous access to corporate data. Common administrative tasks like capacity expansion or reconfiguration, failed component replacement and other maintenance, and firmware upgrades cannot impose any downtime. Proactive monitoring of system performance parameters to enable predictive maintenance and internal redundancies that support features like alternate path failover are requirements for storage that supports these kinds of missioncritical applications. The NetApp Solution For over two decades, NetApp, one of the leaders in the storage industry, has been offering enterprise storage solutions that meet the high bar for performance, availability, scalability, and reliability. Its solutions are used in datacenter infrastructure by organizations of all sizes and in all industries and support nearly every type and class of application used in the datacenter today. While NetApp has designed generations of enterprise storage solutions to provide highly reliable access to data, it has earned a reputation for solutions that are easy to deploy and manage as well. NetApp has a long history with flash storage, first integrating it into its FAS systems portfolio in With Performance Acceleration Modules and then Flash Cache, NetApp used flash as a nonpersistent cache to speed read performance, providing a simple and cost-effective way to add flash performance to its proven enterprise-class designs. In 2012, Flash Pool allowed NetApp customers to leverage flash to improve both read and write performance with a resilient write-back cache design. Virtual Storage Tiering, a feature of NetApp Data ONTAP, supported automated tiered storage configurations with mixed solid state disks (SSDs) and HDDs in FAS systems. E-Series systems, introduced in 2011, were hybrid flash-optimized arrays with a full complement of enterprise-class data services that allowed customers to flexibly mix SSDs and HDDs in tiered storage solutions. The EF-Series systems, introduced in 2013, were flash-optimized AFAs targeted for application environments that needed the highest throughput and lowest latencies all the time while providing the availability and reliability that 3rd Platform applications require. When required, EF-Series customers leverage data management features, which are embedded in the applications they are supporting (e.g., Oracle ASM). Many of NetApp's EF-Series customers are running mission-critical virtual workloads like VDI, database, file and Web serving, and mail, so their ability to support extremely high levels of availability is critical. The NetApp EF-Series combines extreme IOPS, sub-millisecond response times, scale-up capacity, and enterprise-grade reliability. The EF560, the high end of the EF-Series line, delivers up to 650,000 IOPS sustained and up to 900,000 IOPS burst and supports a maximum of 120 drives for up to 192TB of raw capacity. High Availability in the NetApp EF-Series The EF-Series systems run SANtricity data management software. SANtricity, specifically designed for use with flash-based arrays, manages I/O to get the highest throughput and lowest latencies out of flash-based storage and combines low-latency performance with enterprise-class availability and protection. This resilient software foundation for EF-Series systems includes automated I/O path failover, 2014 IDC #

5 space-efficient thin provisioning, online administration, advanced data protection, proactive monitoring and repair, nondisruptive upgrades, and extensive diagnostic capabilities. Specific features include: Wear life monitoring. SANtricity software proactively tracks SSD wear life through proactive drive health monitoring that examines every completed I/O, issuing critical alerts when defined thresholds concerning error, exception, or performance degradation conditions are reached, thereby providing ample opportunity to schedule any necessary predictive maintenance. Resilient caching. The EF-Series includes a mirrored data cache with battery backup that automatically destages to nonvolatile storage in the event of failures. Dynamic disk pools. Data, metadata, and spare capacity are evenly distributed across the array's entire pool of SSDs, minimizing the performance impact of drive failures and delivering shorter rebuild times that are prioritized according to customer definitions of importance. Automatic drive failure detection and transparent failover are supported, with fast rebuilds using global hot spare drives. Data integrity assurance. To ensure that data is validated as correct as it moves through the entire data path from the application to the HBA to storage SANtricity implements the T10 Protection Information (PI) standard to provide seamless end-to-end data integrity. SANtricity Persistent Monitor. The SANtricity Persistent Monitor makes periodic copies of the storage system configuration to make recovery from site and other types of catastrophic failures easier. Choice of RAID levels. Customers can choose between RAID levels 0, 1, 3, 5, 6, and 10, gaining the flexibility to address varying performance and capacity requirements. I/O path protection. Dual active controllers with I/O path protection deliver load balancing and multipath capabilities for path failover in the event of a connection, HBA, or server failure. Nondisruptive operations (NDO). EF-Series systems are designed to support online capacity expansion; reconfiguration; hot replacement of components such as drives, controllers, and trays; and firmware upgrades that do not impact read/write access or otherwise cause downtime. Volume expansion, capacity expansion, RAID-level migration, and segment size migration can all be achieved dynamically, without impeding the ability of the systems to service read and write I/Os. Logical copy (snapshot). SANtricity Snapshot software creates a space-efficient point-in-time image, or logical copy, of a storage volume, enabling secondary servers to access production data for recovery, test/development, or off-host data analysis. Volume copy (clone). SANtricity Volume Copy software creates a complete point-in-time physical copy (clone) of a storage volume, which can be assigned to any host and whose use does not impact the performance of the production volume. Replication. To provide flexibility in setting up disaster recovery configurations, SANtricity supports both synchronous and snapshot-based storage efficiency optimized replication options. In addition, NetApp provides professional assessment, consulting, and implementation services to help design, document, and deploy EF-Series solutions that are tailored to individual requirements IDC #

6 NetApp: Empirically Proven Five 9s Availability The EF-Series systems have been architected to deliver greater than five 9s availability. Utilizing the best practices set by NetApp, most customers have actually achieved six 9s availability in practice. As part of the standard service plan regardless of whether it is administered directly by NetApp or by a NetApp Global Services partner NetApp can monitor the availability of all EF-Series systems. That is an average of roughly 30 seconds of downtime per year. To monitor system availability, NetApp uses the direct remote monitoring capability of its automated "dial home" service called AutoSupport (ASUP). ASUP, when enabled, provides real-time event monitoring and reporting both to the customer and to NetApp, and 70.8% of all EF-Series systems shipped from January 2013 through March 2014 were deployed with ASUP enabled. Note that government clients and other customers may disable ASUP for security reasons if they do not allow any outside connections to their equipment. Using this data, NetApp evaluates the availability of its systems against metrics for total possible runtime and uptime. Runtime hours are the total number of hours in a given time period possible for a population of a particular array model to be up and running properly. IDC looked at NetApp's most recent ASUP data set for the EF-Series, which covered a total of 1,036 controllers, over 4 million hours, that had reported data through June This data clearly indicated that across this sample, all but two systems met or exceeded the six 9s availability requirement. The two systems that did not meet the six 9s availability requirement did meet or exceed the five 9s availability requirement. Storage Availability Audit In addition to constant monitoring of system availability and other system characteristics, NetApp provides other services for ASUP customers. One of these services is a recurring Storage Availability Audit (SAA). This automated summary report leverages the information obtained from the ASUP tracking data and allows customers to review the availability characteristics of their NetApp systems, enabling them to make adjustments or to identify potential issues before they occur. With this service, NetApp is not only identifying best practices around performance tuning, capacity utilization, and availability management but also proactively helping customers optimize those best practices. A quarterly SAA is included with the NetApp SupportEdge Standard service. Additional onsite physical inspections by certified NetApp technical support personnel are provided with the NetApp SupportEdge Premium service. CHALLENGES/OPPORTUNITIES As flash-based arrays become more familiar to datacenter administrators, the next step for vendors in this space will be to deliver flash-optimized AFAs that can fully replace the enterprise storage workhorses of the past. To do this, these AFAs must be effective platforms for dense mixed-workload consolidation, delivering not only high performance but also the availability, scalability, reliability, and mature data services that mission-critical datacenter applications require. When features like snapshots, clones, and replication; storage efficiency technologies like thin provisioning and inline data reduction; and encryption and QoS are built into the AFA platform itself, they can be used in mixed-workload environments much more efficiently IDC #

7 Incumbent storage vendors will introduce AFAs built from the ground up for flash media that include these capabilities, leveraging their long experience delivering highly available platforms with mature data services that can easily integrate into preexisting datacenter workflows. These systems will go beyond the average sub-millisecond latencies that mixed SSD-HDD systems are delivering today, allowing customers to consolidate mixed workloads onto a platform that will consistently deliver sub-500-microsecond latencies. Enterprise storage vendors that do not have such a platform will be challenged to explain to prospects why they do not need one. There are a number of AFA offerings in the industry today from a variety of vendors. While these systems can deliver much better performance than HDD-based systems across the board, many of them are from smaller vendors that are just starting to establish a track record in enterprise storage. NetApp is a trusted vendor with a proven track record in meeting enterprise performance, availability, scalability, and reliability requirements for over two decades. With the EF-Series, NetApp has leveraged that experience to design a flash-optimized storage architecture that puts nothing in the way of consistently delivering highthroughput, low-latency storage solutions in an extremely reliable platform. High performance in flashbased solutions has almost become a commodity, but availability has not, and this metric is of critical importance in meeting the storage performance requirements of 3rd Platform computing workloads. This provides an opportunity for NetApp while other vendors are still proving the ability of their platforms to provide the next-generation storage foundation for enterprise computing. CONCLUSION As enterprises take advantage of what mobile computing, social media, and big data/analytics have to offer with new applications, they will be quickly migrating their businesses onto 3rd Platform computing infrastructure. Built around virtual infrastructure and cloud, and demanding levels of performance and agility far beyond what the client/server architectures of the past could deliver, this new computing platform requires the use of flash for cost-effective storage configurations. Flash-optimized AFAs are the most effective way to fully realize the performance that flash media brings to the table, but today, these systems are still primarily deployed in dedicated application environments. The applications that are most commonly being hosted on 3rd Platform infrastructure are mission critical and, as such, place high demands on the underlying storage infrastructure to provide continuous availability. There is less tolerance for any downtime across all industries, and common administrative operations like capacity expansion, reconfiguration, replacement of failed components, firmware upgrades, performance tuning, and data protection must be performed online without interrupting read and write access to storage. Legacy enterprise storage arrays have the maturity to deliver these capabilities, but the challenge is to provide flash-optimized systems that can meet the performance requirements of the 3rd Platform computing infrastructure with the same types of availability characteristics. NetApp has a long legacy of providing enterprise-class storage systems and has proven its ability to deliver six 9s availability on its FAS systems, with empirical data that has been validated by IDC. The company has leveraged this expertise to produce flash-optimized systems, the EF-Series, that deliver flash performance and also consistently deliver availability in the same six 9s range, as validated by IDC's review of the relevant ASUP data across NetApp's entire installed base of monitored systems. With this level of proven availability, the EF-Series systems provide a trusted platform for missioncritical 3rd Platform computing applications IDC #

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